After re-reading some of the writing I did about what I learned, I decided to share some of these learnings on this site.  They were pivotal in shaping what I know about creativity, and I was able to apply a lot of them in my everyday professional life.  I learned an awful lot from them, and I’m hoping that by sharing them on here, you can too.

We covered the Triune Brain. The Triune Brain states that there are 3 levels of the brain: the neo cortex, the limbic and the stem.

Starting with the last, the stem controls the automatic and instinctual functions of the brain. It does the basics to keep you alive. It controls breathing, heart beat and other automatic functions.  It’s often called the “reptilian brain” because it dominates the brain of reptiles. Most of what they do is automatic and instinctual for survival. In our class, we call this the Gator Brain.

The limbic is where emotions start coming into play. When stimulated, it produces an emotion. The emotion produced depends on how it’s stimulated. It also controls the “Fight of Flight” decision-making.

The neo cortex controls things like language, memory, connections, creativity and learning – all those things that make it fun to be human. The neo cortex also helps interpret the emotions produced by the limbic system.

The 3 systems are graphed as half-circles stacked on top of each other, starting with the stem at the bottom, up to the limbic then all the way to the neo cortex. They all build off of each other and are reliant on each other.

We were taught that most people hang out in the lower sections, the limbic and stem, although we are constantly shifting between the 3. Startling and unexpected moments can send people back to these lower brain functions. The lower brain functions, as outlined above, don’t allow us to fully understand our thinking. We’re basically just reacting to situations when we use these lower portions of our brain. This leads us to look for the negative in ideas. We resist change and new, different ideas because we’re using these 2 portions our brain. When someone is resisting change and only seeing the negative, they’re thinking with their stem or limbic system. This is when the Gator in the brain shows its face.

Real, true creative thinking and reasoning comes when we’re using neo-cortex. We use the connections and reasoning formed in this portion of our brain to be creative. It allows us to see the change a new idea brings as a positive and lets us build on the idea. We can use the connections in this portion of our brain to create new, exciting ideas.

We were challenged to be aware of where we’re hanging out in the the lower portions of our brain and up-shift to the next one if we aren’t where we want to be. Basically, we need to be aware of when our Gator Brain is coming out and we aren’t being productive when generating or evaluating ideas. Being aware of what part of our brain we’re using to think is half the battle. Shifting our thinking to our neo-cortex will help us be more creative.

After re-reading some of the writing I did about what I learned, I decided to share some of these learnings on this site.  They were pivotal in shaping what I know about creativity, and I was able to apply a lot of them in my everyday professional life.  I learned an awful lot from them, and I’m hoping that by sharing them on here, you can too.

On Monday night, the first full day of CPSI, I went to a spotlight session called How To Be Creative 24/7. It was led by Frank Prince. At first I thought it wasn’t going to be a good talk, but it turned out to be great.

It was really focused on the physical mind and mental processes people go through, and how we can turn them into processes and utilize the way the brain is to be creative. The 3 processes I’m going to take away are: Yogi Breathing, Bypassing the Thalamus and Changing Belief Systems.

Yogi Breathing is rapid breathing designed to get more oxygen to the brain to increase stimulation. It’s basically hyperventilating yourself. It was utilized by a mountain climber who wanted a way to divert oxygen and blood from the biggest muscle in his body, his legs, and redirect it to his brain to keep from passing out. The increased oxygen in your brain awakens and kick-starts your brain, allowing you to be more creative.

The thalamus is the part of the brain that helps you understand. It basically exposes ideas and thoughts to rationale. We can bypass this by getting our ideas and thoughts into the Reticular Activation System (RAS), which physically bypasses the thalamus and goes into the cerebral cortex. You do this by believing in something, and that something manifests itself. It’s the principle the book The Secret is based on. If I believe something, I’ll see it. We create our own situations around us. By using definitive language and convincing ourselves of our thoughts, we can see them manifest.

To change your beliefs, you have to change your behavior. You have to get yourself out of the patterns you always follow. Doing this is disruptive, and this disruption will help you change your beliefs because you’re changing your conditional responses both mentally and physically. Conditioned responses happen automatically to stimuli both in your mind and by your body. Changing theses responses changes your belief it what happens next. We have to recognize our conditioned responses, and make a behavior to modify that. For example, I believe that people who watch Nascar are rednecks. It’s just a stereotype I find to be true. So when someone says they like NASCAR, I automatically make them a redneck. It’s my conditioned response. To change this, I’m now wearing a bright green band on my right hand that says HOPE. When I feel myself make this automatic judgments, I snap myself with the band. The goal is to go 1 month without snapping yourself.

So overall it was a really great talk. I enjoyed learning about the physical nature of the brain and what you can do to physically make yourself more creative.

Post-Script: I wrote about how you can use the snapping-bracelet technique to increase your lateral thinking. And, unfortuately, my green HOPE bracelet broke about 2 months after CPSI. I did, however, reach my goal.

In June of last year, I had the good fortune of attending the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) in Georgia. CPSI is the annual conference of the Creative Education Foundation.  Running for 50+ years now, CPSI is where practitioners, academics, and people curious about creativity come together to learn the basic creative problem solving (CPS) model, more advanced techniques in group creativity and creative leadership, listen to experts, and learn by participating in different exercises and activities in creativity.  It’s an immersive and comprehensive experience that teaches an awful lot.

I first learned about the conference through a colleague at work.  We use CPS techniques when we’re facilitating an ideation session and in the other work we do with clients.  We try to send at least one person a year.  By attending CPSI, I was able to see the process our process was based on.  It gave me a new understand of the process we use, and I was able to make some connections and bring some of what I learned into our process and into my everyday work.

To call the conference “life changing” is accurate, and just might be an understatement.  I came back from CPSI more passionate and enthusiastic about creativity than I ever was.  I met some amazing people that I will remember for the rest of my life, and learned from some of the best instructors I’ve ever encountered.  I learned more than I ever thought I could.  When I left, I knew creativity was the direction I wanted to take my career.

After re-reading some of the writing I did about what I learned, I decided to share some of these learnings on this site.  They were pivital in shaping what I know about creativity, and I was able to apply a lot of them in my everyday professional life.  I learned an awful lot from them, and I’m hoping that by sharing them on here, you can too.  Click on the “Learnings From CPSI” tag to bring up the articles.